An afternoon appointment is going to force me to get the Sift out promptly today; the first two articles will go out as fast as I can proof-read them.
And then tomorrow I head to Louisville for the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, which will keep me too busy to put out a Sift next Monday.
Today’s first article will have the unlikely title “Apocalyptic Optimism”. Two recent books have something interesting in common: Gar Alperovitz’s What Then Must We Do? and David Graeber’s The Democracy Project are upbeat books based on the premise that America-as-we-know-it is falling apart. I’m classifying them as “apocalyptic” using the royalist/prophetic/apocalyptic framework that journalist Robert Jensen borrowed from theologian Walter Brueggermann. What makes them upbeat? Well, as Graeber says in his last paragraph, “The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die.”
The second article “Herd Immunity Against Online Spying” is more of a how-to. The recent revelations about the NSA have re-awakened my interest in ways to be more anonymous online. I’ll ignore things that require you to become a hacker or convince your friends to use encryption, and focus instead on changes you can make simply on your own: the Tor browser, Tormail, and a neat little program the Air Force uses called Lightweight Portable Security. Maybe you have nothing to hide, but the more people who use these kinds of tools, the harder the NSA’s job gets.
Third, I’ll summarize a bunch of what we learned about the NSA this week and warn you not to get distracted by the hero-or-traitor debate in “Edward Snowden Is Not the Issue”.
The weekly summary is called “Dissidents” after a Thomas Dolby song. Syria, Turkey, DNA patents, the unlikely Brewer-Obama alliance, and why taping your mouth shut is more speech than Wisconsin can tolerate.
This week there’s no avoiding the surveillance issue and the revelations of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. There are three parts to this story: First, just getting the facts straight. Then, how do we think about this? And then, what can we do? I’ll take my first shot at those questions in “PRISM and Privacy”. (Short version: I’m normally a use-the-ordinary-political-process guy, but this issue might call for monkey-wrenching if we can figure out how.)
Another newsy story is the report the College Republicans put out last Monday about how the GOP can appeal to voters born since 1980 — because eventually all voters will have been born since 1980. I’m not a big fan of the College Republicans, but the insight-to-propaganda ratio in this report is pretty high. (I doubt, though, that they will be able to influence their headstrong elders. And I can’t decide whether I think that’s good or bad.) I’ll summarize in an article called “Smart Kids”.
Those two topical stories have crowded out an article I promised last week: a review of Gar Alperovitz’s new book What They Must We Do? That will have to wait until next week, and I’ll probably also be ready to comment on David Graeber’s The Democracy Project by then.
In the short-notes part of the weekly summary, some articles worth staring into space about. Notably, Ta-Nehisi Coates recalls what a bad high school student he was and tries to imagine a message that would have moved him, and college professor Ben Warner writes about the complex emotions that arose when one of his students emerged as a notorious white supremacist — there’s no hope for converting the intolerant without exposing them to human kindness, but sometimes that feels wrong too.
The College Republican article will appear in the next hour or so, and I hope to have the PRISM article posted by noon (EDT).
Two featured articles this week. First, “Category Error: what’s wrong with the ‘breadwinner mom’ study” focuses on the new Pew Research report that got so much attention — not so much the flap over the crazy reactions to it from the war-on-women types, the report itself. I don’t see what Pew was thinking when it defined the category. The women in it are so diverse that I have a hard time making any true statement about all of them. (For example, they aren’t all breadwinners.) Just about the only thing you can do with the term “breadwinner mom” is turn it into a stereotype; no wonder that’s what pundits did.
The second article “Starve the Corporate Beast” discusses how to keep your money from going through the corporate system by using co-ops, local businesses, and employee-owned businesses. Most of us don’t want to live completely off the grid — I know I don’t — but what simple changes can you make to avoid supporting corporate power?
In the weekly summary, people were talking about Obama’s nefarious scheme to “pack” the D. C. Appeals Court — by nominating people to fill the vacant positions, like the Constitution says a president is supposed to do. Also: the earn-to-give path, where you pursue a high-paying career with the idea of living simply and giving most of the money away.
Other stuff worth your attention: I found a couple interesting interviews. In one, Noam Chomsky talks about anarchism, and in the other theologian Peter Rollins describes how most churches have turned God into yet another idol. (You can tell you’re worshipping an idol, he says, if it gives you certainty and security. In the presence of a real God you feel uncertain and insecure, but you learn to be OK with it.)
The breadwinner-mom article should come out in the next hour or so, and I expect the others to be out by noon, east coast time.
Two main articles this week: One covering President Obama’s surprisingly thoughtful speech about the future of the War on Terror, and the other wondering what happens to the IRS scandal now that boring details are starting to emerge. (Prediction: Mainstream media will get bored and move on. Fox News and talk radio will manufacture the exciting details they need to keep their audiences entertained.) The IRS article will be out momentarily, and the War on Terror article a couple hours later.
In the weekly summary: the Oklahoma tornado, the I-5 bridge collapse, a strange coincidence of stories involving atheism, good news for ObamaCare, and a solar airplane.
This week’s main article “Blow Smoke, Yell Fire” will describe the fizzling of the latest Republican attempts to find or manufacture a scandal they can use to impeach Obama. With the base getting ever-more-radically conservative and the party establishment beginning to realize how suicidal that is, impeaching Obama is the only agenda they can agree on. Now they just need some high crimes and misdemeanors.
In addition to the wannabee scandals, everybody was talking about Angela Jolie’s breasts — everybody except the people who always talk about celebrity breasts. They were strangely silent. Lots of people (in my world, at least) were also talking about the true meaning of Star Trek and whether this new movie gets it or not.
Maybe we should have been talking about filibuster reform, the bold economic experiment happening in Japan, and some fascinating research about how to keep political discussions from polarizing.
I’m moving slowly this morning, so stuff may appear a little later than usual. The main article somewhere between 10 and noon, New Hampshire time, and the weekly summary not long after.
The featured article this week is about Benghazi, which I’ve been reluctant to discuss because it has been so blown out of proportion that anything you say about it just makes it worse. But then the circular logic of conspiracy theories says that you’re participating in the cover-up. So I’ll talk about Benghazi, but I’ll call attention to the way the story is being driven by the conservative entertainment complex’s search for ratings and subscribers.
The weekly summary mentions what everyone has been talking about this week: the Cleveland abductions and whether the U.S. should intervene in Syria. You should also read Senator Whitehouse’s sermon denouncing global-warming denial as bad religion, and watch a 20-minute video of astronauts talking about “the Overview Effect” — how seeing the Earth from space changes your point of view.
The featured article this week will look at the visionary economics of sustainability: How would our whole society have to change if we accepted that each generation had to leave the planet more-or-less as we found it? In other words, what if we aimed not for growth — more and more people consuming more and more stuff and leaving more and more waste behind — but for a steady-state economy whose output was consistently sufficient to support a stable population?
The text for that sermon is a new book by Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill, Enough is Enough.
The weekly summary calls attention to: the massive industrial accident in Bangladesh, Jason Collins’ coming out, atmospheric CO2 nearing 400 ppm, and how the Bush Library continues the parade of BS that characterized the Bush administration.
I spent the weekend enjoying Portland, Maine (the best little city in the Northeast) rather than doing my background reading and prep work, so the Sift will come out a little slowly today.
The featured article this week is a review of Tom Allen’s recent book Dangerous Convictions: What’t really wrong with the U.S. Congress.
I don’t usually like books by out-of-office politicians. Most of them are either revising history to make their mistakes go away or polishing their rhetoric for a comeback. But ex-Maine-congressman Allen has done something thoughtful here. He’s taken his impressions from 12 years in the House and combined them with a lot of background reading on how Americans think and talk about politics. I found the result both enlightening and thought-provoking. (And now I have to go repeat Allen’s reading project, starting with Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart and Robert Putnam’s American Grace.)
His diagnosis, in brief, is that the fundamental cause of the polarization in Congress is a deep worldview difference between Democrats and Republicans that makes them unable to take each other’s points of view seriously, much less find common ground or work out compromises. He goes a long way towards tracing the roots of that worldview difference. Almost accidentally, he ends up tracing out a Republican reform agenda far better than anything Republicans have come up with.
In the weekly summary, the Boston bombing conversation has shifted towards discussions about Islam and conspiracy theories. I’ll give my advice for dealing with the conspiracy theorist in your life.
Also, the George W. Bush Presidential Library opened, and lots of people bent over backwards to say nice things about the Bush legacy. But when the worst presidents in American history are discussed, George W. Bush will always be part of that conversation.
In the shorter notes: Obama may be looking for a way out of the War on Drugs. Attempts to defend austerity are still falling flat. And Medicare is about to end a program that cuts costs and improves care.
It’s been one of those weeks: At last count, 14 people were dead and dozens still missing in the Texas fertilizer explosion, and that event could barely stay on the front page with all the Boston coverage.
The Sift isn’t a breaking-news kind of blog, so my coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing is to take a step back and wonder what it might mean to the country long-term. The thing that stands out to me is how the narrative hooks of 9-11 got reversed: In 9-11, heroism set the stage for greater tragedy, symbolized by the first responders who charged up the burning tower and died when it collapsed. In Boston, the initial tragedy set the stage for greater heroism.
So I wonder if Boston can be the first step in undoing some of the mistakes we justified by pointing to 9-11. And so the first featured article this week is: “Maybe 9-11 Can Be Over Now”.
The second featured article is longer, because the topic is more complicated. In “Why the Austerity Fraud Matters” I try to explain why you should care about an academic dispute between economists: The case for focusing on the national debt rather than unemployment is based on a highly influential paper that is simply a fraud.
That doesn’t leave much space for a weekly summary, but there’s still that Texas thing to deal with. And the Senate siding with the NRA over the American people.
It’s Tax Day, so it’s time to ask the annual question: “How big was your work penalty in 2012?”
As you may already know, investment income like dividends and capital gains is taxed at a flat 15% rate, which is lower than the rates paid by many people who work for wages. Plus, payroll taxes don’t apply to investment income, and there are a number of other advantages.
Usually, this gets described in terms of the virtues of investment: capital formation, job creation, and so on. But once upon a time, work was considered virtuous too. So I prefer to describe this situation as a work penalty. You pay more tax because you work for a living rather than watching your money work for you.
The simple version of the work penalty is not hard to figure if you have your 1040 handy, and if more people knew their work penalty, we might raise enough outrage to do away with it.
Obama’s budget has put Social Security back in the news, so the second featured article is “Three things I know about Social Security”.
In the weekly summary, everybody was also talking about Margaret Thatcher and (for some reason I can’t fathom) a country-western song.
